Kamala Harris pledges executive order on gun control if Congress doesn't act in her first 100 days

Democratic presidential Candidate Sen. Kamala Harris, D-Calif., speaks at the Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority South Central Regional Conference in New Orleans. (AP Photo/Gerald Herbert)

Sen. Kamala Harris on Monday night pledged that, if elected president, she will sign a series of executive orders on gun control if Congress fails to pass comprehensive legislation in her first 100 days in the Oval Office.
During a town hall hosted by CNN, Harris said that if a bill from Congress did not make it to her desk, she would unilaterally mandate background checks for customers purchasing a firearm from any dealer who sells more than five guns a year.
Dealers who violate the law, she said, would have their licenses revoked. The other executive orders would prohibit fugitives from purchasing a firearm or weapon, as well as close the loophole that allows some domestic abusers to purchase a firearm if their victim is an unwedded partner.
“There are people in Washington, D.C., supposed leaders,” Harris said, “who have failed to have the courage to reject a false choice which suggests you’re either in favor of the second amendment or you want to take everyone’s guns away.”
She continued, “we need reasonable gun safety laws in this country, starting with universal background checks and a renewal of the assault weapon ban, but they have failed to have the courage to act.”
The proposal is Harris’ second policy announcement since launching her presidential campaign, the New York Times reports. The former California attorney general previously proposed a federal increase in teacher pay.

Klobuchar has 'please clap' moment, says CNN's Chris Cuomo 'creeping' over shoulder during town hall

2020 presidential candidate Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., saw a couple of viral moments during a televised town hall on Monday night.
The first: what critics and analysts have called her “please clap” moment. Klobuchar was boasting that in each of her elections she won every congressional district in her state, including that of former Rep. Michele Bachmann, a Republican.
After the audience didn’t react to her victories, Klobuchar gave them permission to be excited.
“It’s when you guys are supposed to cheer, okay?” Klobuchar grinned, which prompted applause and some laughter.
Many on social media have drawn comparisons to former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, who famously told a town hall crowd to “please clap” on the campaign trail during the 2016 election.
Later on, the Minnesota Democrat had an awkward encounter with CNN anchor and town hall moderator Chris Cuomo.
While discussing how to address climate change with rural voters, Klobuchar stressed how important it was and told Cuomo that she wanted to “finish” her thought before he interrupted.
She then, however, felt a little creeped out by Cuomo’s presence.
“I feel you creeping over my shoulder,” Klobuchar told the CNN anchor. She jokingly clarified, “not in a Trumpian manner.”
Klobuchar was referring to the second presidential debate in 2016. Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton later accused then-candidate Donald Trump of being a “creep” for approaching behind her on the debate stage and claimed her “skin crawled” in her memoir, “What Happened.”

Dem leaders reject immediate impeachment proceedings in urgent conference call

Leaders of the House Democrats backed off the idea of immediately launching impeachment proceedings against President Trump in an urgent conference call Monday evening amid a growing rift among the party's rank-and-file members, presidential contenders and committee chairs on the contentious issue.
Fox News is told by two senior sources on the private conference call that even House Financial Services Committee Chair Maxine Waters, an anti-Trump firebrand, told fellow Democrats that while she personally favored going forward with impeachment proceedings, she was not pushing for other members to join her.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., and her leadership team were clear there were no immediate plans to move forward with impeachment, Fox News is also told. Well-placed sources said it was a spirited 87-minute call involving more than 170 Democrat members, including House Intelligence Committee Chair Adam Schiff and House Oversight Committee Chair Elijah Cummings.
"We have to save our democracy," Pelosi said, according to the sources. "This isn’t about Democrats or Republicans. It’s about saving our democracy. If it is what we need to do to honor our responsibility to the Constitution – if that’s the place the facts take us, that’s the place we have to go."
Pelosi asserted that more investigations were needed: "We don’t have to go to articles of impeachment to obtain the facts, the presentation of facts.”
Waters' hesitation and Pelosi's remarks signaled clearly that, for the time being, any impeachment effort would struggle to gain steam. Just last week, Waters, D-Calif., took a far more aggressive tone, charging that "Congress’ failure to impeach is complacency in the face of the erosion of our democracy and constitutional norms."

Rep. Maxine Waters, D-Calif., said while she personally favored impeachment proceedings, she was not pushing for other lawmakers to join her. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite, File)

Waters also has called Attorney General Bill Barr a "lackey," saying he was not being "respectful" to Congress. Barr held a news conference presenting Special Counsel Robert Mueller's conclusions and has referred bluntly to the FBI surveillance of the Trump campaign as "spying," rankling Democrats even as he said the important issue was whether the spying was properly predicated.
But on the call Monday night, Waters took a more muted tone and said she was simply saying what she personally thought -- not demanding impeachment proceedings.
Congress is currently on a two-week recess, and representatives are scattered across the country.
The brewing fractures among Democrats were evident on the Sunday talk show circuit, as Schiff, D-Calif, told "Fox News Sunday" that the impeachment question presented a "very difficult decision" that would take "the next couple of weeks" to determine.
“I'm not there yet, but I can foresee that possibly coming,” Cummings, D-Md., said on CBS News’ “Face the Nation.” House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, D-Md., said Democrats would be wise to instead focus on the upcoming presidential election.
“Obstruction of justice, if proven, would be impeachable,” New York Rep. Jerry Nadler, the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, said on NBC News’ “Meet the Press,” adding his committee would “see where the facts lead us.”
Nadler issued a subpoena on Monday for documents and testimony from former White House Counsel Donald McGahn, who resisted Trump's calls to fire Mueller, according to the special counsel's findings.
On the conference call, Nadler discussed the subpoena and announced that McGahn will be the first witness in a new series of public hearings based on the Mueller report and Democrats' other related document requests.
Nadler said the hearings will aim to provide the public with a robust understanding of what’s at stake in these matters and an opportunity to hear from the key witnesses who could speak directly to questions of obstruction, abuse of power and corruption that may have been committed by the president or his allies.
Meanwhile, prominent progressive freshman Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., and Sen. Elizabeth Warren, a Massachusetts Democrat running for president in 2020, wholeheartedly embraced the impeachment push.
Pelosi recognized the intra-party split in a letter to Democrats on Monday, ahead of the conference call.
“While our views range from proceeding to investigate the findings of the Mueller report or proceeding directly to impeachment, we all firmly agree that we should proceed down a path of finding the truth,” Pelosi wrote. “It is also important to know that the facts regarding holding the president accountable can be gained outside of impeachment hearings.”
Pelosi added: “Whether currently indictable or not, it is clear that the president has, at a minimum, engaged in highly unethical and unscrupulous behavior which does not bring honor to the office he holds."
During the call, Pelosi urged colleagues to read the letter carefully.
Mueller's 18-month-long probe found no evidence the Trump team conspired illegally with Russians, and debunked numerous conspiracy theories that mainstream media outlets had advanced on the topic. Democrats quickly pivoted to focus on whether the president had illegally obstructed the Russia investigation -- a question Mueller chose to allow Barr, the Justice Department, and Congress to address.
Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani told "Fox News Sunday" that it was unfair for Democrats to expect that Mueller could ever "exonerate" Trump on obstruction.
"You do not apply a standard of exoneration to anyone," Giuliani told Chris Wallace after saying the standard was "warped" and that the Mueller report was full of "lies" told by disaffected Trump aides.
"Whether it’s a president, an impeachment," Giuliani said, "you can’t exonerate. Exoneration means proving a negative."
Fox News' Alex Pappas, Chad Pergram, Mike Emanuel and The Associated Press contributed to this report.

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Ben Carson explains benefits of investing in 'Opportunity Zones' for areas facing economic challenges

Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson spoke on “The Next Revolution with Steve Hilton” in an interview that aired Sunday about proposed new regulations aimed at making it easier for investors to take advantage of tax breaks for investing in “Opportunity Zones” in low-income areas.
“Policies have been pretty much aimed at putting people into programs,” Carson said, and now the Trump administration is trying to get poor Americans “out of the programs and self-sufficient.”
President Trump said last week that 8,700 neighborhoods across all 50 states and U.S. territories have received the Opportunity Zone designation and would be eligible for the federal tax incentives he's proposed.
“The entire island of Puerto Rico is an opportunity zone,” Carson said.
“We are very concerned about the rural areas, too,” he added.
Trump’s proposed regulations were issued by the Treasury Department. They sought to clear up questions that were keeping some investors from using the incentives.
The program was included in the $1.5 trillion tax cut legislation that Trump pushed through Congress in 2017.
The new Opportunity Zones were set up to enable private investors to re-invest profits into designated areas.
“They are going to invest that money somewhere,” Carson said.
He noted private investors would do what they do because they “want to be successful.”
As White House officials have explained, investors in Opportunity Zones could get tax benefits by deferring their capital gains taxes invested in the zones until 2026. They also could receive discounts of up to 15 percent on capital-gains profits invested in the zones and would pay no capital-gains taxes on investments in the zones held for at least 10 years.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.

Trump administration set to end sanction exemptions for nations importing Iranian oil: report

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo speaks at a news conference to announce the Trump administration's plan to designate Iran's Revolutionary Guard a "foreign terrorist organization." (AP Photo/Patrick Semansky, File)

The Trump administration is set to inform five nations that they will no longer be exempt from U.S. sanctions if they continue to import oil from Iran, reports said Sunday.
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo plans to announce the policy move on Monday, which would no longer renew sanctions waivers for allies Japan, South Korea, and Turkey. The other countries no longer exempt are China and India.
The waivers for sanctions will expire on May 2. The Washington Post first reported on the move, and three sources confirmed the report to the Associated Press.
President Trump finalized the measure on Friday, according to the Post, in an effort to apply “maximum economic pressure” by cutting off its oil exports and reducing its main revenue source to zero.
In reaction to the administration’s move and expectations of tightening supply, early trading on Monday indicated Benchmark Brent crude oil futures rose by as much as 3.2 percent to $74.31 a barrel, the highest since Nov. 1, Reuters reports.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.

Mark Levin blasts Mueller report as ‘impeachment’ manual for House Dems and media

The Mueller report is a 400-page, $35 million op-ed that amounts to an “impeachment report” for the liberal media and House Democrats, argued Mark Levin on his Sunday program, “Life, Liberty & Levin." '
The Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s nearly two-year investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election found “no collusion” between President Trump and Russia. The Department of Justice released a redacted version of the report in two volumes on Thursday.
Levin called the result a "pathetic joke of a report" that established nothing the general public didn't already know and its findings didn't warrant a "special investigation."
“There’s no collusion, says the Special Counsel. That takes one sentence. It doesn’t take 200 damn pages. It doesn’t take $35 million dollars,” Levin said, referring to Vol. 2 of the report.
Despite the Democrats warning of a "Saturday Night Massacre" like President Nixon during Watergate, President Trump never asserted executive privilege to prevent documents or people around him from talking to Mueller. He was an open book," Levin argued.
But after the report found no evidence of collusion, the Democrats, who had been discussing impeachment since the day after Trump was elected, pivoted to pinning obstruction of justice charges on the president, Levin said.
"This is an abuse of power by a prosecutor. This is the only prosecutor in the entire country who writes a report under justice department regulations, a report that is only supposed to go to the Attorney General, who then makes decisions about whether to release any of it. Or all of it, because there’s no requirement for this to be released at all," Levin said.
The Mueller report is, essentially, Levin argued, "an impeachment report" that was written for the "media and the "Democrats in the House of Representatives."
“They wrote it for CNN, they wrote it for MSNBC. They wrote it for Nadler and Schiff and all the other reprobates. They wrote the report for them,” Levin said.
Levin said the investigation "runs completely contrary to a civilized society" and a "constitutional system," yet there is not a single Democrat member of the House of Representatives or "so-called news person" at any major outlet that appears to be concerned.

Pete Buttigieg draws parallels between Trump fans and Bernie Sanders supporters: report

Democratic presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg on Friday said that President Trump’s supporters were similar to Bernie Sanders’ supporters because they both feel marginalized and want to tear down the system.
The comments came during a campaign stop in downtown Nashua, N.H. before a crowd of mostly high school students, according to The Washington Examiner.
The 37-year-old mayor of South Bend, Ind. said that a sense of “anger and disaffection” grows from neighborhoods and families who are struggling to get by despite reports of a healthy economy.
“It just kind of turns you against the system in general and then you’re more likely to want to vote to blow up the system, which could lead you to somebody like Bernie and it could lead you to somebody like Trump. That’s how we got where we are,” Buttigieg said.
Buttigieg drew a distinction between himself and the 77-year-old Vermont Senator, saying that although he greatly admires Sanders, “I don’t have the same views on everything that he does.”